We first saw the Erica Synths Sample Drum module when the Techno System was revealed back at Superbooth 2018. Since then it’s been conspicuous by its absence. All the modules come along quite quickly until the full system was released in the summer – without the Sample Drum. But good news, it’s here!

Sample Drum

Well, almost here – February 23rd is the officially announced release date, but that’s close enough. Sample Drum is a 14HP sample player and sampler module that they’ve designed for drums and percussion – but, of course, it can handle any type of samples. It contains two identical sample engines so you can run 2 channels of independent sound. Samples can be sliced and loop and triggered in 3 different modes. There are tuning functions, pitch tracking (1v/oct) virtual VCAs, envelopes and real-time effects.

The samples are stored and loaded from SD card and it comes with a 16GB card packed full of interesting content. Internally there’s 32MB of RAM which equates to about 5 minutes of sampling time.

Each channel has 3 CV inputs that are freely assignable and there’s a lot more going on in here than they are telling us so far. Hopefully, more information and videos will be forthcoming as we near the release date. The little screen looks great as does the sweeping through the samples in this little video:

The website does say that it has the ability to record samples but I can’t see any audio inputs unless one of the CV inputs doubles up for that.

It’s taken them a while to get Sample Drum to a state that they are happy to release so I hope this means that this module is going to be as awesome as we always knew it would be.